


Reinventing Rescue

by typervoxilations



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, BAMF Women, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fantasy, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-03 23:47:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6631960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typervoxilations/pseuds/typervoxilations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It goes a little like this: </p><p>Your princess is not in another castle - she can rescue herself just fine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reinventing Rescue

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a poem by theapplepielifestyle, which inspired this entire work. 
> 
> Beta'd by rikacain.

_When they are placed up in a tower and told to wait for their hero,_   
_our princesses take their fate by the guts_   
_slide their thighs around the neck of their thrashing dragon_   
_and take to the stars._

\- ‘Reinventing Rescuing, ii,’ theappleppielifestyle

* * *

 

  It goes a little like this:

  The mermaid doesn't bury the knife in the breast of the man who couldn't hear the silent cracking of her aching heart, much less the soundless words she would no longer ever have the chance to speak - small mercies when the knives shatter her aching, aching feet - but doesn't cast it away either.

  She doesn't turn into sea foam - she wakes up, human lungs gasping for air on the morn of his wedding, tears streaming down her face that tasted a little like home, relief and regret in equal measures because perhaps her real curse is her continued, tortured existence.

  Perhaps, she mourns, the witch has won.

  Perhaps, she realizes, the witch hasn't won at all.

  Oh, her heart will never be the same, but isn't that the beauty of being human?

  Her true love wasn't married in the morn - her true love with the rise and set of the sun and the wind that carried voices to her from far away and didn't smell like salt and the stretch of forever that was not the sea - her true love would have never been married.

  She exchanges the jewel-bright knife of brine that should have taken the life of a prince for a ride on the back of a rickety old carriage out of town, a brittle coral smile when they ask her where she wants to go. _Anywhere_ , she writes, handwriting shaky on roughspun parchment, ink bleeding onto her fingers the way the pain bled into her feet. _Everywhere_ , she whispers to herself in the voice she has lost forever, and learns how to speak in other ways.

  It goes a little like this:

  Beauty doesn't break a curse because maybe, maybe her Beast wasn't the one cursed at all. He is old, old, too old to remember what it was like before - there is no room for being human anymore when being a beast is all that he knows.

  She in turn is tired, tired of her old life because what awaits for her there?

  Brothers who had gone to war and sisters who had gone to madness, and a father who was not her father, who had sold her to the devil so that he would live to see another day.

  She, who has magic in her veins and who the whims of the castles bows to - _mistress_ , the enchanted finery whispers to her, _queen_ , the rose bushes croon.

  Her Beast doesn't love her as a woman, betrayed by two too many in his life but that hardly bothered her - he is her friend, her brother, her kin, and saw that she wanted neither finery nor luxury and gave her everything better: a well groomed coat of fur to keep her warm even in the most bitter of winters and a wicked set of claws to protect herself - and when she looks at herself, reborn, in the mirror, she smiles, fangs glinting crimson

  It goes a little like this:

  The people forget that before her cloak was red, it was white - they forget that it is red only because she had been through the belly of the beast and emerged; not by any hand of a hunter or a lumberjack but by her own - small and shaking and clutched around the handle of a butter knife only because it had been in hand when the wolf towered over her, madness in its eyes.

  Between her and grandmother, they slit the creature’s throat to make sure he could never terrorize another - skin it for the pelt and peel the meat off its’ bones to hollow those to be carved. _Waste not, want not_ , the old woman tells her with a voice that is far too steady for someone who had wrestled with a predator and won - anyone less couldn’t have survived the forest as she had.

  The people forget that her cloak had been white because her grandmother dyes it with the blood of their quarry and lines it with the fur she cleaned herself and they have never seen a more beautiful trophy of a hunt.

   _Little Red_ , they call her, though it is not pity in their voices but awe.

  It goes a little like this:

  Rapunzel grows up refusing to eat her vegetables and learning numbers by counting the steps she could take from one end of her tower to the other, and then again across. She learns to write by scrawling across the walls until she’s brought books to read and her thirst for a knowledge of everything beyond her four walls brought her more. She watches the smoke of distant places turn into little gray wisps against the white fluff of clouds and imagined she could become them.

  Mother Gothel tries to keep her satisfied but there is only so much satisfaction to be had when your legs begin to cramp from the steps you already know how to take.

  Her voice isn’t used to sing mournfully for a world she only watches from afar, instead tucked behind her teeth as she smiles her acquiescence to being “protected” and hopes it doesn’t look as much as it feels: like the bared snarl of defiance.

  Instead of waiting for her prince, she watches the stars in the sky and sets her course through the single window and, when the witch isn’t there, ropes her shorn braid around the hook to rappel her way to freedom, knapsack of meagre belongings across her shoulder, and runs barefoot to her freedom.

  It goes a little like this:

  Skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony, she is born from the whims of the sighs of a queen in the monochrome of a dead winter. She is named Snow White but she should have been Blood Red because she takes her mother’s final breath as her first and screams her proof of living as she is severed from an anchor of death.

  She is fae-child, magic child, and magic that creates must have a price that only brings ruin. She does not sing with woodland creatures, but instead the arch of a bow sings beneath her hands and the whistle of the arrow soaring through the air catches in the hollow of her breast like a siren’s call.

  She knows how to end a creature’s suffering far more quickly that she learns how to dance, and that is how she survives.

  Her stepmother is vain, vain, and Snow White covers her ears from the mirror’s poison with blood red hands and decides she must never be beautiful.

  Before the huntsman takes her away, she takes to the woods in the dead of winter, runs until she can run no longer and the trees twist and swat at the feeble and pale sun, ebony bark curved into thorns that catch at her skin until she bleeds red onto fresh layers of disturbed Snow.

  She had been born to be a daughter but she is also a fae-child, magic child, and the magic that had created her was demanding its due.

  She doesn't find a tiny cottage of tiny men hidden deep over the mountain range, doesn't get that far, but instead an old hut long since abandoned in the folds of black branches that look like chicken legs to claim as her own until the magic finds her, as it always would. She doesn't see or cook or clean, instead mutters dead languages in the dead of night to dead ears; until bony fingers reach for her though the barriers, curl around her and in them, she finds her comfort.

  The witch-queen cannot harm her, because magic learned pales in comparison to magic bestowed - and apples, even poisoned, wither with the touch of death.

  It goes a little like this:

  There is only so much one can take, when your step sisters tack the ashes of a burnt out fire to your name and laugh in your face when they say _it soots you, haha, get it? Soot?_ They sneer and try to make her cower in shame but she holds her head high and her shoulders low and smiles as sweetly as she is able even as she feels it crack the corner of her lips.

  It earns her several hours more of chores when she dumps the bucket of cinders in their laps but it was worth every second to listen to their shrieks of panic, because if she must be Cinderella then she chooses to be born from the roar of a volcano than the splutter of the fireplace.

  Near woman grown, biding her time, leaving gravel in too small shoes and leaving the pantry doors cracked open for the mice to raid rich foods she wasn’t allowed to touch, and she discovers herself dragging blackened hands along basement walls and realizes her fingers are not meant for threading needles and scrubbing kitchen floors.

  Her stepmother jealously guards the jewels and pearls and glittering coils of her late husband’s gold as a dragon would its wrongfully acquired hoard, but she does not notice the sheets of vellum that disappear off his desk.

  Cinderella bribes her way to the ball with charcoal copies of loved ones and beloved things, tucks stained hand under stained skirts and doesn't join the dancing. Instead she hides in the balcony and flattens parchment against marble and sketches the jagged edge of stained glass eyes lest she forgets them in the morning, and instead, this is how the prince finds her.

  The only magic is the bud of camaraderie that blossoms full overnight and the carmine rays of early morning hours illuminate their parting; she doesn't leave him with a slipper of glass, or fur, but instead with black powder blemishes on the inside of his wrist the shape of fingertips and the imprint of a promise against his cheek the shape of lips.

  He doesn't need to look for her because she comes to him, years later, this time with a smile glowing with color when she paints the gleam of the golden crown on his brow - the portrait of a well loved king.

  It goes a little like this:

  None of them sit idly by, twiddling their thumbs and sighing with eye raised to the heavens wondering if someday their prince would come, because in the treasure trove there is burnished armor and sharpened swords and it only takes a single act of bravery to swing their legs over the scaled arch of the dragon's neck where their legs fit snug into the dips of its' shoulders as it takes to the skies. 

  Your princess is not in another castle - she can rescue herself just fine.


End file.
